I didn't die. Or so I believe, anyway. Basically, I got a job. This has sort of been in development since before summer break, but since I didn't really know the details about just what it was I'd be doing until a few weeks ago, I didn't bother blogging about it. And then I figured I probably shouldn't blog about anything here without first talking about this relatively very significant development. And so my blog stagnated.

Anyway, I now work at the California Community Colleges technology center, located on the Butte college campus. Exactly what it is that we do doesn't seem very well defined. We basically seem to be the guys colleges go to for various technology-related services, whether it's hosting, making custom maintenance software, video post-production work for Web-based classes (a project we're going to start soon), etc. It looks like I'm pretty much their main web developer now, and I've already gotten through a few tasks including writing a script that enables certain programs used at various colleges to communicate with each other, as well as rewriting one of their websites to be more standards-compliant and accessible. There are at least two more sites they want me to rewrite in the near future. They want to standardize these sites on a LAMP (P=PHP) setup instead of the Windows, IIS, MSSQL, and ASP setup they currently have. Don't blame me for pushing the change, they were already thinking in this direction before I joined the team. I just happen to very much agree.

As a part-time student worker attending that college, there's a wage cap around minimum wage, but they say that will quickly increase once I transfer from Butte to the university. I just got my first ever paycheck: $459. The workload has been pretty light so far, and the variety in the tasks I get makes work fun. I wouldn't mind doing this sort of thing full-time for a living (assuming the pay would go up accordingly, of course). We'll see how it goes from here. I'll apparently also get a number of all-expenses-paid trips to attend various seminars here and there, and those hours will count toward work hours.

School has been less than enjoyable so far. I find that I get just about nothing out of attending the physics lectures, but it comes together once I sit down and do a couple problems out of the book. That's probably not so much a shortcoming of my teacher as my own personal learning style. I've never gotten much out of sitting and listening to someone babble and doodle on the board, but I tend to be a quick learner once I'm by myself with problems and a reference. I got an "A" on both of my first midterms, so it seems to be working so far.

Right now, though, I'm at the point where I wouldn't hesitate to quit school and take a full-time job if I was offered something of interest. At this point, I'm not really learning anything in my computer classes that I couldn't learn in a weekend on demand, and most of the other classes are pointless filler required for graduation. The more I go through it, the more frustrated I get that my time could be spent building tools and solving problems in a real-world environment. This is what they call "jumping through hoops", but I'm not sure that these hoops are even leading me anywhere I can't reach through other (simpler and quicker) means. Perhaps this is only ego and foolishness talking, but based on my past experiences and the responses from those around me, I don't think it is. My nature is usually to expect the worst — to expect that I'm completely unprepared for whatever I'm about to get myself into — but with my experience so far in computer classes and now at my job, it feels as though I'm a math major attending a beginning algebra class.

Don't get me wrong, though, I'm perfectly happy to get paid doing what I'm doing in the technology center, and there is plenty of stuff that I'm learning, but that knowledge has been coming pretty easily. A few weeks ago I looked at the first bit of ASP code I had ever seen, and that day I fixed a few longstanding problems with the ASP code on one of their sites without any more difficulty than I'd have debugging a piece of code in a language I'm already familiar with.